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Ethan Crumbley Parents Found Guilty of Manslaughter
Ethan Crumbley is a school shooter who killed four people. This does not make him unique. What makes him unique is that his parents have been found guilty of manslaughter for it. https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/16/us/james-jennifer-crumbley-trials-differences/index.html
The legal theory is that the parents were extraordinarily negligent- and, TBH, at least the mom seems to have been a shitty parent who ignored her son's obvious mental illness- and provided a firearm to their son despite clear evidence he was at least a potential danger to others. I don't think this legal theory is particularly novel even if it's rarely used; when I took my CHL class in much more firearms-friendly Texas I was told that if I provided a minor with a handgun, I could be held liable should they kill someone with it. But on to some article quotes:
So his father was convicted under the idea that he had a positive responsibility to store firearms in a way inaccessible to a mentally ill teenaged boy. I'm not an expert on Michigan law, but I'm pretty sure that the letter of the law says something along those lines in most states, and it would be very difficult to argue that he doesn't have a moral responsibility. But maybe he was a responsible gun owner who took measures to keep his troubled son away from household guns that a reasonable person would expect to be sufficient:
Nevermind. While I'm leery of the precedent this sets for obvious reasons, I have no trouble acknowledging that James Crumbley deserves to go to prison and, were I a juror, I'd probably have voted to convict. On to the mom's case.
This does not paint a picture of good parenting. Furthermore,
IANAL, but Jennifer Crumbley's legal defense strategy sounds sufficiently suboptimal that she seems to just have generally very bad judgement, maybe the mental illness runs in the family. That being said, I'm a lot less comfortable with the legal logic here- being a generally shitty parent who has bad judgement and neglects her son's mental health problem isn't illegal. I'm comfortable calling her a shitty parent and saying she should be called out for it but it kinda seems like a novel legal theory of the sort that's generally bad.
Personally I doubt this case will be widely replicated; the Crumbleys seem to have had much-more-damning-than-average facts. But let's go to the general principle; parents sometimes being held responsible when their minor child kills someone doesn't seem terribly controversial, no doubt had they left out a gun and their five year old killed someone using it to play cowboys and indians this would be a rare scenario but not a case that grabbed much attention. And it doesn't seem controversial either that Ethan Crumbley was sufficiently crazy to be less than 100% responsible for his actions. On the other hand, parents of teen murderers getting tried for manslaughter is definitely abnormal; teen murderers almost certainly suffer from distinctly below average parenting, too, although I would expect that in the median case that's due to a single mother's weird work schedule or poverty rather than a wealthy woman neglecting her kid. I think the difference is that these parents had, at least materially, the ability to do better. His mom obviously knew her son was showing signs of being crazy but preferred horses, extramarital affairs, and booze, his dad had a gun safe but didn't store the murder weapon in it(and when I was a teen with my own guns they were required to be stored in my dad's gun safe, which seems like the reasonable policy for your teen owning guns). This wasn't a single mom working a shift that made it hard to pay much attention to her kid, which is a lot closer to the family scenario for most minor criminals and for most mass shooters.
QuantumFreakonomics's comment did the most to influence my thinking. The car analogy is a good one to ponder.
Implement of mayhem aside, the issue of concern in my book is another small step forward to "lock up the crazies fast" but now expanding to the indirectly crazy - the parents.
Ever since the Virginia Tech shooting (possibly earlier) a steady mid-brow point has been "people with, ya know, really bad mental health problems, shouldn't have firearms ... and maybe knives ... cars could be bad too ... maybe we should commit them." The obvious slippery slope there is (a) There are plenty of well adjusted people who have mental health histories - what's to stop the state from arbitrarily deciding they are now a threat and (b) The obvious market adjustment that those with new mental health problems will simply conceal them and not seek help because of the risk of deprivation of basic rights. Where this gets especially dystopian is when known associates of any individual start to use "hey, you know he/she is really crazy right!" in vindictive personal lawfare. The best existing example of this is the weaponization of mutual restraining orders in divorce proceedings to try and secure an advantage in custody. I can see an easy early version of this in parents who, exasperated with a rebellious child, decide to inform "the authorities" that their angsty teen is, in fact, super coconuts and should be sent to one of those padded wall spots (while Mom and Dad enjoy some childless stay-cation time).
With this case, the message has been sent to parents of "troubled teens" that they might want to consider severely restricting their child's access to myriad things/activities/privacy/independence and, perhaps, even to begin involving "counselors" and other semi-state apparatchiks all to avoid personal liability in the event something drastic happens.
OR
The message has been sent to parents to not at all engage with their child's problems, and essentially hope they go away. But its important to maintain that plausible ignorance - again - to avoid personal culpability.
Being shitty parents has to absolutely remain 100% legal. If it becomes illegal to be a bad mom or dad, we're directly on the road to State-As-Parent, the elimination of privacy, and the enforcement of current political majoritarian monoculture at the nuclear family level.
The problem of people no longer seeking treatment is to my mind one of the more serious problems with this ratchet. Managed properly, people with even serious mental illness can live somewhat normal lives. But untreated mental illness can easily become a time bomb in which the person muddles until they can’t anymore. And removing guns for mental illness or cars or knives doesn’t help when the people with those mental illnesses decide not to risk losing their guns or their car by talking about their anger issues or depression or bipolar. Then it goes off in an explosion when the person with anger issues takes them out on a room full of people.
Yes, but this is not something a safetyist culture is equipped in any way to constructively deal with (as a bonus, whenever this happens, it gives them more justification/fervor to ban and confiscate their outgroup- or in other words, "the demand for violence in society vastly exceeds its supply"- so it's only neutral at best).
Naturally, every other approach tacitly posits accepting a base rate of abuse of rights for the existence of rights themselves; that is why the Dead Kids South Park episode is the way that it is [but it only really works if you understand that viewpoint, since they don't actually go out of their way to fill in that blank].
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